So at this point, the basic framework of my story with Haruhi should be clear: boy meets girl, girl crushes boy's hopes and dreams, girl punches friend of boy, boy and girl decide to work together to become Heroes, even if they're both Quirkless; when you put it into words, it's almost like something straight out of a movie.

Haruhi's parents ended up being in the principal's office for a long time, so as much as I wanted to meet them, with how late it was getting, I decided to go home. My mom and my little sister wanted to know why I was home so late, but I just told them that I was hanging out with a friend, which wasn't a complete lie when you really thought about it. They both assumed that I was talking about Kacchan, but I didn't bother correcting them. I was too busy thinking about what Haruhi just did and what she might do tomorrow.

I had a lot of thoughts about what Haruhi would do the next day, but it turns out that they were all wrong. Kacchan went after me the second I walked into the class, but Haruhi—moving like she had an EX ranking in Presence Concealment—was there to stop him before things could get ugly. The second that situation was diffused, though, Haruhi basically reignited it by announcing to the entire class that the two of us were going to become great Heroes in spite of being Quirkless, and anyone who had a problem with it could—well, that's not the kind of language I'm supposed to use around my sister, so I won't repeat it.

Suffice to say that Haruhi didn't meet up with any of the girls from class that day. Every break between classes had her run straight to me, and lunch was the same thing. We generally kept talking about the same mundane stuff, but every meet up now had Haruhi talking about how we couldn't let everyone think we were just talk. We needed to show everyone that we could become Quirkless Heroes, and she had a "master plan" to do that. I asked her what it was, and she just told me not to worry about it and to leave it all to her, which probably meant that she hadn't actually come up with anything yet.

Nevertheless, she and I made plans to meet up on Sunday to do whatever she ended up coming up with before then, if anything at all. It was all so weird, but I'd be lying if I said that wasn't excited.

On a Sunday in early May, Midoriya, for once in his life, woke up early; so early that he stepped on the cold floor of his room the second his sister barged in to wake him up. The look on her face was a sight to behold, but he would have to save the beholding for the memory of the face. He had a big day ahead of him, he assumed.

Today was the day he and Haruhi were going to get started on becoming Quirkless Heroes. Truth be told, Midoriya still had no idea what, if anything, Haruhi had come up with. Whenever he asked her about it during the week, she said that it was a secret, which had him thinking that she was only saying she had a plan to cover up not having one at all. However, as Midoriya put on his jeans and his T-shirt with "Wifebeater" written on it, he realized that he would have been okay with that. Getting to hang out with Haruhi on the weekend—with anyone, really—was something to look forward to, so even if it didn't end up being serious, he could still enjoy himself.

"Well don't you look happy, Izuku," his mom said to him. Before he knew it, he was at the kitchen table eating breakfast with his mom and little sister.

"D-Do I? I mean, do I look so happy that it's worth commenting on?" Midoriya asked.

"Yeah, you look like you're on fire, Deku-kun, and I didn't even hit you with my Quirk again!" said Midoriya's little sister, simultaneously bringing up a far too painful and far too recent memory. "You've been way too happy for a while now, but it's never been like this, so what gives?"

Is it that crazy for me to be happy? Midoriya thought. "Well, I'm actually going out with a friend today."

"Kacchan's coming over? Yay!" His little sister was practically jumping out of her chair.

"I-I didn't say—"

"That's so nice to hear, Izuku. You and Kacchan don't play outside of school that much anymore, so it's good to know that you're still good friends," Inko said.

"I-I mean, we aren't not friends, but I never said—"

"Mom, can Kacchan hit me in the face when he gets here?" Midoriya's little sister asked.

"You have to do it outside, and only if you eat everything on your plate," Inko said.

"Again, I keep trying to tell you two—" Midoriya was interrupted by the doorbell. Midoriya volunteered to answer it; if his family wasn't going to listen to him, then he didn't need to spend so much time around them. Even if it was just a salesman or an NHK subscription fee collector—which they had already paid for that month—at least they'd hold a conversation.

"Good morning world!" was how the person at the door greeted Midoriya. Far too energetic for a salesman or a fee collector. It only took a second for Midoriya to see that it was Haruhi dressed in jean shorts and an orange shirt with a panda logo on the chest.

"S-S-Suzumiya-san! What are you doing here?!" Midoriya asked.

"What do you mean? We agreed to meet up at your house today," Haruhi said.

"We agreed on noon; it's barely nine-thirty."

"Well, I got bored, so sue me." There were a lot of things Midoriya wanted to do, but that was low on the list.

"Izuku, who are you talking to?" Without him realizing it, Inko had made her way to the entrance to the apartment, his little sister closely trailing behind her. "Can we help you, Miss…"

"My name is Haruhi Suzumiya, and I've come to take possession of your son for the day, Mrs. Midoriya," Haruhi said. Why she phrased it like that, Midoriya had no idea.

"You're what? Wait, are you the friend Izuku is playing with today?"

"You mean Deku-kun has friends who aren't Kacchan?!" Midoriya's little sister asked.

"That's what I was trying to tell you two! Seriously, is it so crazy that I could hang out with someone other than Kacchan?" Midoriya asked. Everyone—even Haruhi—nodded their head at that. In retrospect, he did very easily walk into that one.

"Bakugou's old news, ma'am and adorable little child," Haruhi said. "I'm like New Coke, a bold new taste that'll make you forget all about the old brand!"

Isn't that the exact opposite of what happened with New Coke? Midoriya thought.

"Furthermore, please don't refer to what we're doing as 'playing'. After all, your son and I are about to embark on some serious training to become Quirkless Heroes!"

"You're what?" Midoriya couldn't get a perfect read on the look on his mother's face, but it certainly wasn't a happy one. People were talking about him being a Hero, so that made sense for her.

"Deku-kun, can I come with you and Suzumiya-san? I can blow you guys up if that'll help!" Midoriya's little sister said.

"Sorry kid, this is a private training session with me and your brother, but when we're done, I'll come back here and play with you all night long. Also, Suzumiya-san isn't cool, so just call me Haruhi," Haruhi said as she rubbed a hand through his sister's emerald locks.

"Yay! Haruhi, you're almost as cool as Kacchan!"

"Probably, but I don't have any intention of making my reputation go lower."

"Anyway," Midoriya cut in. "As I said before, you're way too early. I mean, we can get started now since you're already here, but I need to help my mom clean up—"

"No, no, don't worry about it! Just-Just go out with your friend!" Inko said in a hurry.

"Really? Um, okay." With that, Midoriya quickly went to his room to grab his wallet, put on his red shoes, and left the apartment with Haruhi, his sister sending them off with a great deal of enthusiasm.

"Your family seems nice," Haruhi said as Midoriya closed the door behind him. "Especially your little sister. God, what a little cutie! She'd be a fifteen out of ten on the little sister scale if it weren't for that blind admiration of Bakugou." Midoriya wanted to know what this alleged little sister scale was measuring.

"It's not blind admiration; Kacchan actually gets along well with my little sister," Midoriya said, adding an "A lot better than he does with me" under his breath. "He treats her like the little sister he never had, probably because they have similar Quirks."

"Really? What can she do?"

"Well, my mom has telekinesis and my dad can breathe fire, so those combined to give her a specialized form of pyrokinesis. The way it works is that she absorbs the kinetic energy of anything that hits her—simultaneously reducing the damage to virtually nothing—and when she's built up enough of it, she releases it in the form of a fiery explosion."

"That's so cool! So that's what she was talking about when she said she could blow us up! Come to think of it, dealing with something like that could be beneficial for our training."

"Please don't. My feelings about my little sister being used as a dumbbell aside, she still doesn't have great control over her Quirk. Didn't you notice that the door to our apartment looks completely different from every other door in the complex?"

"Come to think of it, I guess it would be weird for that to be a fashion statement, at least with that paint job. But you know, we can go house hunting later. Let's get the first day of the rest of our lives started!" Haruhi enthusiastically pumped her fist into the air.

"Y-Yeah." Midoriya pumped his fist into the air with comparatively less enthusiasm. It was good to hear that there actually was a plan, but the fact that he still had no idea what it was was less than ideal.

Since the whole operation was Haruhi's idea, she naturally led the charge. She escorted Midoriya to the train station where they rode the first train for two stops before getting off at Koyoen Station. From there, she grabbed him by the wrist—an act that left Midoriya looking like a tomato—and pulled him through the crowds of people until they ended up at a mostly empty park. Midoriya noticed that for someone who had only been living in Musutafu for a couple of weeks, Haruhi exhibited a great deal of familiarity with that part of the city. He suspected that she brought him to her neighborhood, but he didn't ask about it; he was too busy thinking about what Haruhi had planned for them.

"Okay, where did I put it?" Haruhi asked as she walked through some bushes. "I think it was—ah! Here it is!" Haruhi jumped out of the bushes and placed a large cardboard box filled with what looked like meaningless junk in front of him.

"Suzumiya-san, what is this?" Midoriya asked.

"A box of scraps." He was close enough.

"And what is it for?"

"Simple: you're gonna build something!" Haruhi looked very proud of herself for saying that, but Midoriya had no reason why that was.

"B-Build something? What do you mean? What do you expect me to build with this?"

"Whatever you want. Think of yourself as DaVinci and this box as your canvas and make whatever you want. Try to make something that can fly and shoot lasers, though."

"Um…" There were many forms of protest Midoriya wanted to offer for many obvious reasons, but the look Haruhi was giving him made it clear that nothing like that would work. Not knowing what else to do, Midoriya started digging through the cardboard box. Sure enough, it was filled with things like batteries, magnets, circuit boards, jumper cables, and random pieces of metal. As far as tools went, there was a hammer, a box of nails, a tube of Gorilla glue, a roll of duct tape, and a blow torch. It didn't take the genius Haruhi expected Midoriya to be to see that she had a limited understanding of what went into crafting technology.

Almost immediately, Midoriya put the blow torch to the side; he didn't care what Haruhi had to say—which was, fortunately, nothing—that was too dangerous to use. That being said, Midoriya didn't have an inkling of what he was supposed to do with the other tools just because they were safer to use, so he just started doing stuff at random. The random pieces of metal were the only things that looked safe to nail, but they were all too thick for the nails to go through, so the hammer quickly became useless. As useless as they were in a practical sense, the glue and the duct tape ended up being the only tools he both could and wanted to use, so he spent the next twenty minutes or so sticking everything together in various ways until he ended up with an abstract artist's interpretation of a robot.

A gentle breeze blew by, and the monstrosity fell apart at the seams.

"Seriously, what do you expect me to do?" Midoriya asked. "I-I know I get good grades and that I like to take notes on Heroes, but I'm not a super-genius or anything!"

"Yeah, I pretty much assumed it would go like this," Haruhi said as she started shoveling the junk back into the box.

"Y-You did?"

"Of course. Like you said, just because you're smarter than some of your peers doesn't mean it'd make sense for you to be a super genius. I'm actually glad that you saw a bunch of junk and couldn't make something super cool out of it. After all, if you were smart enough to make the kinds of gadgets and gizmos that people like Batman or Iron Man fight with, then it'd kind of make it hard to say that you're gonna be a Hero who doesn't have powers. That kind of intelligence would make anyone superhuman, so claiming that you're Quirkless when you also have that going for you is just kinda lazy, you know?"

"I guess? Maybe? Wait, if you didn't want me to be able to invent something from garbage, then why did I go through that at all?"

"Because I had to be sure, obviously. You don't want to spend your whole life wondering what could have been, do you?" Haruhi was the only one who had any of those thoughts, but Midoriya decided to keep that obvious fact to himself. "Now that that's out of the way, we can get on to the real master plan. If we stick to this, we'll become Heroes in no time!"

"What's the plan?"

"The plan…" Haruhi paused, looking like she was listening to an imaginary drum roll. With all of the build-up, it had to be something good. "The plan is to do 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and ten kilometers of running every single day!"

There were no words; every attempt at them on Midoriya's part failed miserably.

"Stunned silent, eh? Not surprised. It's a pretty great plan if I don't say so myself."

"S-Suzumiya-san, is your plan just having us copy something from a manga?" were the words Midoriya uttered when he regained the ability to speak.

"Of course not." Midoriya breathed a sigh of relief. "We're skipping the parts about not using an air conditioner and only having a banana for breakfast. The last thing I need is to be a bald fourteen-year-old girl, after all." The sigh was sucked back inside.

"Suzumiya-san, that's completely ridiculous! Are you going to tell me with a straight face that this is what we should be doing? I thought we were both serious about this!"

"Hey, I'm just as serious as you! Since we don't have Quirks, we need to at least have tough bodies to beat up Villains with, so why not do something that guys on Youtube show actually works?! Besides, it's not like you came up with anything." Haruhi made a pout with her last comment, and as the sight of that was burned into his memory, Midoriya conceded that she had a point. Haruhi's idea might have been too stupid for his liking, but between the two of them, she was the only one who had an idea, so he couldn't really justify complaining.

"You're right. I'm sorry."

"You should be. I know I'm just copying someone else, but it still took me a while to think of this." As Haruhi spoke, she removed her headband and tied it around the back of her hair to give herself a ponytail.

"L-Let's do it!" For reasons Midoriya was too young to understand, the sight of that filled him with a great deal of energy.

Haruhi's Spartan-like training was just as aggravating as Midoriya feared it would be. Much to his own surprise, the push-ups didn't completely destroy him in his effort to complete them, but he was starting to feel a noticeable strain in the middle of the sit-ups. By the time he had forced out thirty squats, his body felt like it had been turned into brittle glass, and by the time he—by some incredible stroke of fate—completed the arbitrary set, he fell to the ground and let out a series of heavy pants.

"Come on, Midoriya! Are you really winded after just that little bit?" Haruhi asked. All of the physical exercise was a pain in and of itself, but what made it worse for Midoriya was how Haruhi was somehow going through it all while barely breaking a sweat.

"It's like you're a perpetual motion machine or something," Midoriya said between haggard breaths.

"Hey, even I have my limits, it just takes me a lot longer to reach them than it does you apparently. Don't you feel even a little shame from being so blatantly outdone by a girl?"

"I'm pretty sure all of this agonizing pain is superseding that."

"Pretty convenient excuse, if you ask me." Haruhi kneeled towards Midoriya, who was still lying motionless on the grass. "Still, it's weird that you fell apart so easily. Feeling exhausted is one thing, but you should still be able to stand just fine. Do you not exercise or something?"

"I mean… I don't not exercise." While Midoriya certainly put more stock in brains than he did brawn, it wasn't as if he never did anything to stay in shape. He was never the type of person to find a reason to sit out gym class, and whenever he went to the country to visit his cousins during the summer, he always joined them on their hikes through the woods. He wanted to feel proud about doing at least that, but the second he tried, he remembered that just getting dead last in everything at gym still left him exhausted and that his cousins always had to cut their collective pace in half so he wouldn't get left behind.

"Midoriya, I want total honesty from you. Before I came into your life, what, exactly, was your plan for becoming a Hero?" Midoriya couldn't say anything; unfortunately, it wasn't from a lack of trying. The picosecond the question hit his ears, he racked his brain to try and come up with a response, but nothing came to mind. Even though he was Quirkless, even though Bakugou was always telling him he couldn't be a Hero, he never gave up on that dream, but now that Haruhi had brought it up, he never actually did anything in the pursuit of that goal. At the very least, he could have kept in shape a bit or learned how to throw a punch, but he never even thought about doing anything of the sort.

"I'm such an idiot," Midoriya said. "I kept talking about being a Hero, but I never did a thing to try and make it happen, even though I've always been ten steps behind everyone. What, did I think I could just stumble my way into U.A., or something? What is wrong with me?"

"I don't know if anything's wrong with you per se, but if you ask me, all you've been lacking is the proper motivation. Saying that you want to change might be a walk in the park, but actually making the effort is a completely different story, especially when you're going at it alone. Lucky for you, you've got yourself a pretty good co-author, one who's not afraid to jab you with a pen if you start slacking off. I hope I don't have to keep reminding you, but we're in this together, got it?"

Haruhi was smiling at him again; down from where Midoriya was, the sun and her smile looked to be one and the same.

"Got it." Midoriya found himself filled with newfound energy and stood up off the ground. Without saying a word to Haruhi, he got started on the final phase of their training, though he quickly heard a laugh and footsteps from behind him. Haruhi might not have been a perpetual motion machine, but with her behind him, Midoriya felt like he could easily become one.

Two seconds after completing one kilometer of running, Midoriya collapsed to the ground.

At some point, Midoriya awoke to the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling. When he shot up, he saw an ice pack fall off his head and a colorful blanket fall off of his body. With every passing second, it was becoming abundantly clear that he was no longer in the park, but he still had to figure out where he now was and, most importantly, where Haruhi was.

From a general survey of the area, Midoriya saw that he was in what looked like a living room—it was at that time when he noticed that he had been lying on a couch. The coloring of the walls and rug were moderately pleasing to the eye, and the state of the plasma screen TV, foreign oil paintings, and various other furnishings—including the aforementioned couch—suggested a reasonable amount of wealth on the part of the owner. Nice to know that money wasn't a problem for his possible kidnappers.

"Oh, you're awake. Another hour and I would have started to get worried." The person talking to Midoriya was a svelte adult woman with long dark hair who walked into view with barely a click from her heels. Something about the woman looked familiar, but he couldn't put his finger on it, even with how much time he spent looking at her face. Midoriya was always good at making eye contact with people, but he found it especially easy to do that with her because he felt too uncomfortable looking at her body, on account of her being dressed like a playboy bunny, for some reason.

A-Am I in Holmby Hills?! Midoriya thought.

"Wait, you look red. Did I speak too soon?" asked the bunny girl. "No, it's the bunny girl outfit obviously. Prepubescent boys are always so adorable."

"Careful there, honey. It's stuff like that that gets you on some kind of list." A new person decided to join in on whatever it was that was happening. This person was a brown-haired man with an emotionless expression; just like the bunny girl, something about his face seemed familiar, and the reason he came to that realization was from him being too nervous to look at the pink apron that had "Violate the Chef" written on it.

"W-W-W-Where am I?!" Midoriya asked, his body shaking like a leaf.

"Calm down. You're probably in good hands," said the man in the apron. Midoriya started shaking even more.

"Why did you say 'probably'?" the bunny girl asked.

"I can't see the future. Who's to say something terrible won't happen to him?"

"Hey, so I was looking for a good nurse's outfit to put on, but the pink one still has that curry stain from Nodoka's birthday party, and the only white one I can find is my Yu-Gi-Oh cosplay. Any idea where—Midoriya, you're alive!" To make things more confusing, the third person to enter the scene was the familiar face of Haruhi, her hair hanging out of a ponytail and hanging loose once more; Midoriya found that disappointing, for some reason.

"S-S-Suzumiya-san, what's going on?! Where are we?! Why are we in a weird place with weird people?!"

"What? Oh, what did you two say to him?"

"Nothing that requires censorship, at the very least," the bunny girl said.

"That's not the only hurdle you need to jump, you know!"

"Agree to disagree," said the man in the apron. Haruhi pouted at him the same way she did at him earlier—however long ago "earlier" was. It soon became rather obvious where he was and who these people were in relation to Haruhi.

"Suzumiya-san, a-are these your parents?"

"Yeah, for better or worse," Haruhi said. With that confirmed, that meant he had to be in Haruhi's house. Her house looked rather nice, he found himself musing.

"U-Um, nice to meet you both! T-Thank you for allowing me into your home!" Midoriya stood up and gave a series of quick bows.

"No need to be so formal. We're just happy to finally get a chance to meet the Izuku Midoriya. Our daughter talks about you a lot, after all," said the man in the apron.

"Shut up, Dad," Haruhi spat.

"Anyway, if we're giving out introductions, I'm Sakuta Suzumiya, father of one, loyal househusband, Mai-san's fantastic lover—"

"Neither the time nor the place," said the bunny girl as she flicked Sakuta in the forehead. "I'm Haruhi's mother Mai Suzumiya. I'm an actress, so you might know me under my maiden name of 'Tadamichi'."

"Tada—Oh wow! You're Mai Tadamichi! I thought that you only looked familiar because you share various facial features with Suzumiya-san, but you'd have to be living under a rock not to know Mai Tadamichi! Every show you star in tops the ratings for the week it airs, every movie you appear in is number one at the box office opening weekend, and every Twitter feud you get in ends in your complete and utter victory!"

"You sure are good at talking," Sakuta said.

"Even that outfit you're wearing has to be from your new show, Lapis Lagomorph, the Bunny Girl from the Fifth Dimension! Tell me, the bunny girl costume is meant to highlight Lapis' struggle to find a balance between her new life on Earth and the memories of her original world, right?"

"No, the director just wanted to put a girl in a bunny girl costume," Mai said.

"Which, of course, makes it the best show ever," Sakuta said.

"I-I mean, it's not like I only watch it for that, so—wait, how did we get to talking about this? What am I even doing here?" Midoriya asked.

"Well, after we barely got any running in, you collapsed like a sack of potatoes, so I brought you back to my house and called my parents for help. It was a good thing we were doing our training in my neighborhood; it would have been torture to try and lug you onto a train," Haruhi said. "They brought a doctor over, and he said that you just fainted from exhaustion and you'd be fine with some bed rest, so there wasn't any need to take you to a hospital."

"O-Oh. That's good, then."

"Don't let our daughter's tone fool you. When she called us, she was crying her heart out about how she needed us to 'move Heaven and Earth, and Hell too, while we're at it' to save her little friend," Sakuta said.

"I was not crying! Look at my face; there is definitely a dry eye or two in the house!" Haruhi said.

"I find that hard to believe. After all, the sound of my adorable baby girl in tears is the only thing that can get me to leave work early," Mai said.

"Mom!"

"That reminds me, I need to change out of this." Mai gave a quick bow as she stepped out of the room, Haruhi glaring at her the entire time.

"Midoriya, you're ignoring everything these two say about me, you got it? It's complete nonsense, so there's no point in listening to it! Besides, even if I was crying—which I wasn't!—it would have been totally justified! Can you imagine the bad press I'd get if my partner died on our first day of working together? There's no way I'd want to deal with something so annoying, so if anything, you should be apologizing for almost making that my reality!"

"I-I don't really get what you're trying to say, but if it'll put an end to all of this, then I'm sorry," Midoriya said.

"Next time, don't push yourself too hard because you get caught up in my daughter's charismatic stupidity," Sakuta said. "That training you're doing is fine enough, but remember to bring food and water with you. You also don't have to do everything in one go, so if you feel winded, take a break. It'll all even out in the end."

"Yeah, I guess that'd be the best way to handle it," Haruhi said.

"Atta girl." Something about the scene seemed strange to Midoriya. Fortunately, it only took him a second to figure out what it was.

"Suzu-No, Saku-Wait, that's also—"

"Sakuta's fine. Unless, of course, you think you're man enough to call my daughter by her first name."

"Sakuta-san!" Midoriya said without hesitation. Haruhi seemed to roll her eyes at that, but he elected to ignore that. "Um, so you don't have a problem with Suzumiya-san and me trying to become Heroes? Even though we're both Quirkless?"

"Hm? Yeah, I guess. I mean, Mai-san and I aren't exactly taking it in stride," Sakuta scratched his chest for a second, "but we don't see why you can't do it; not like having a Quirk automatically makes it a safe job, after all. Either way, Haruhi being Haruhi should more than make up for that, and since you're going to be spending a lot of time together, that'll probably rub off on you."

"Oh, it'll definitely rub off on him. We're in this for the long haul, after all," Haruhi said. She gave him that same smile she liked giving him, the one that said, "If you just shut up and follow me, everything will be fine." If Midoriya was being honest, he had no reason to believe that that wasn't the truth. "So Dad says that one of us losing consciousness automatically ends training for the day—"

"As it should," Sakuta said.

"—so he's gonna take you home, but… as it turns out, you just happened to wake up at around noon, so we might as well take advantage of the timing and let you have lunch with me—us before you have to go home."

"Y-Yeah, okay," Midoriya said.

"Better be okay."

"Ah, how nostalgic," Sakuta said with a grin.

"No, it's not!" Haruhi said. Midoriya didn't understand what he was getting at.

"I don't know if you have the authority to decide that when the only thing you can be nostalgic for is baby food. If you want, we can have that for lunch instead," Mai said, returning to the room in normal and stylish clothing.

"That's not what I'm saying!"

"Oh, Mai-um, Suzumi-Tadamichi-san! You forgot to take off your ears," Midoriya said.

"No, I didn't, these are real. Want to touch them?" Mai asked, the apparently real bunny ears wiggling about.

"Oh, so it's okay for him to touch them, but not me?" Sakuta asked.

"Yes, because there's a difference between touching and groping."

"I prefer to call it caressing."

"Caress something else."

"Don't worry, I will."

"Let's just eat, okay?!" Haruhi said. She grabbed Midoriya by the wrist and pulled him into the kitchen, something Midoriya couldn't stop himself from smiling at.

After all, even if Haruhi thought her parents were the most embarrassing people on the planet, at least they supported her.

After a lunch consisting of ham sandwiches and mineral water, Sakuta and Mai drove Midoriya back to his apartment, Haruhi tagging along to keep her promise of playing with Midoriya's little sister. Sakuta had to run some errands and Mai had to shoot a commercial, so they couldn't come in to meet Inko, but they told Midoriya to tell her they said hi. Sakuta then gave Midoriya a list of protein and health supplements he could take to help increase his performance before he and Mai drove off to go about their business.

"I'm home," Midoriya said when he and Haruhi walked inside the apartment. Inko was sitting at the kitchen table, the confusing look from earlier in the day still plastered on her face.

"Hi, Deku-kun! Hi, Haruhi! Let's play!" said his little sister, coming in like a wrecking ball.

"You got it, kid!" Haruhi said. "Midoriya, after we're done playing, let's try and alter the plans a little bit so there's less chance of you dying."

That probably should have been a factor from the start, Midoriya thought.

"Also, now that I think about it, we should get a martial arts teacher. You know, someone to teach us stuff like wrestling, aikido, and maybe a little Bartitsu, while we're at it." Midoriya didn't think that they would have to fight Moriarty anytime soon, but he kept that to himself. Haruhi chased after his little sister as she ran into her room, but before Midoriya could follow with comparatively less enthusiasm, his mother asked him to sit down.

"Is something wrong, Mom?" Midoriya asked.

"N-No, nothing's wrong! It's just that…" Inko looked down at the table for a second before taking a long breath. "Izuku, I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"Sorry for… for only being sorry all those years ago, I mean."

"All those—oh. O-Oh." Now it was making sense.

"You-You just had your dream shattered before you even had a chance to live it, and instead of trying to make you feel better, all I did was try and push you further away from it. You never gave up trying, and every time I heard you say you still wanted to be a Hero, all I could feel was regret for not saying what you wanted to hear. I'm sorry, Izuku. I'm so, so sorry."

"Mom, please! Stop it! Y-You don't need to apologize! It's not…" "It's not your fault I was born like this," was what Midoriya almost said, but he managed to stop himself; she didn't need to hear that, and he didn't need to say that. "Why are you saying all of this now, of all times?"

"Because of Haruhi." Naturally. "When she said that you two were going to try and become Heroes in spite of being Quirkless, I felt happy that you had a friend who wanted to stand by you, but at the same time, I felt sad that a little girl was offering the kind of support that I, your mother, never even tried to. I-I don't want to be like that anymore, so… I want you to know right here and now that I'm going to support you every step of the way!"

"Mom, I… thank you." In the presence of the words he waited over six years to hear, that was all Midoriya could bring himself to say; his tears did the rest of the talking.

"Midoriya, Midoriya! Look at this!" Cutting through the tension of everything that just happened was Haruhi. Midoriya didn't object to it; with how serious his mother had gotten, he welcomed a little bathos.

That sentiment died the second he saw Haruhi hit his little sister in the head with a baseball bat.

"Why?!" Midoriya asked.

"Because it's fun!" Haruhi said as she hit her again. "I thought you exaggerating, but she really doesn't feel a thing. This is so much fun!"

"I'm invincible!" his little sister said. Haruhi hit her in the head a third time, and after the hit landed, her body started glowing a bright green.

Twenty minutes later, Inko took Midoriya, Haruhi, and his little sister with her to a department store to buy a new table to replace the one that was just blown up.

So that was how my first day training with Haruhi ended: not with a whimper, but with a bang; not like Haruhi would have wanted it any other way, of course. We didn't actually get a lot done, and you'd think that me passing out from exhaustion would make it a total failure, but it wasn't. I got to meet Haruhi's parents, I got to see Haruhi in a ponytail, and best of all, I got to feel the full force of my mom's love and support.

I'd like to see someone not count all of that as a win.